


the place of things that are

by thehandsingsweapon



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Christophe is the Marquis because Of Course He Is, M/M, Neverwhere AU, Victor Nikiforov Makes Major Life Decisions On A Whim Again To Ill Effect, Yuri Plisetsky is an Actual Cat Sometimes, sim is back yet again to tell you that Victor is not even a real human
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-02
Updated: 2019-01-02
Packaged: 2019-10-02 17:11:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17268092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thehandsingsweapon/pseuds/thehandsingsweapon
Summary: Perfectly ordinary Yuuri Katsuki is having a No-Good, Terrible Tuesday: a strange man who has forgotten his name seems to have accidentally erased him from regular existence, and he has followed a cat through a puddle into an alternate edition of New York that he never needed to know existed.Furthermore: Yuuri has never believed in dragons, and he'll be damned if he's going to start now, except for the problem of the one that's gotten loose in the bridgemarket, looking directly at him, and anyway, it's only the third thing that's tried to kill Heartmouth in a single day.For Victor Nikiforov, this isn't particularly unusual. It's just Tuesday.





	the place of things that are

_ The dragon roars. There is only so much lassitude and melancholy it is prepared to tolerate, and the unruly, wild cold of its magic ripples under the skin, burns in the precise inverse of fire.  _ **_Enough,_ ** _ thinks the mage, who tears through his own library for a solution in the deep valley of his own mania. After he has composed his palace of mirrors, he begins to cast the spell that will shatter them all.  _ **_Enough._ **

 

\- - -

 

It has been a very long time since Mr. Chulanont has had such a merry chase through the Aetherwild. Just ahead of him runs Mr. Lee, whose cold, calculating eyes manage the complicated calculus that separates them both from their quarry. Mr. Chulanont is nimble and slight, and he darts to and fro as they come crashing through the seaport. Ordinary men would not throw sharpened knives through a crowd with such wayward, foxlike glee, but Mr. Chulanont is not an ordinary man and his aim is too neat for collateral damage. After all, he has a reputation. Up front, Mr. Lee, who is also no ordinary man, races onward like a wolf after a scent. They are the same, Mr. Lee and Mr. Chulanont, except that Mr. Lee is generally serious and Mr. Chulanont usually smiles; identical, except for all of the ways in which they are absolutely nothing alike. 

“I think we’ve almost got him, Mr. Lee,” says Mr. Chulanont. Mr. Lee never speaks. Between them, Mr. Chulanont does the talking and a fair bit of the hurting, and Mr. Lee does the finding and, usually, applies the killing stroke. It’s a gentleman’s agreement: the wolf always gets to go for the throat. “Come on,” he shouts ahead, because the taunting is also fully his dominion, “You must be so tired of running, you pretty thing. All our employer wants is to give you a rest.” That it will be a permanent rest really makes no difference to Mr. Chulanont; after all, that is usually the only kind of rest he and Mr. Lee provide.

The runner is indeed tired of running, and with the wounds he bears, he knows he can’t make it much further. His magic flickers like a lightbulb ready to go out; he drags the last bits of it to his fingertips, and clears the alley onto the next street. He darts past several shops, their windows shiny and reflective. Here is a man selling only mostly-broken trinkets, there is a woman who sells messages locked away in bottles, and on the corner is a hag who buys and sells actual memories, none of which are her own. His reflection in the window is a powerful, terrible thing, different than he knows he must be, but this is only the smallest of his current mysteries. He does not know who he is, but he knows, as he skids to a stop in front of the window, that he can travel through its reflective glass, and go anywhere.  _ Somewhere safe,  _ he thinks, desperately, and he disappears just as one of Mr. Chulanont’s well-thrown knives crashes through the window and shatters it completely. “Damn,” says Mr. Chulanont. 

Mr. Lee stops, silent and stoic as ever, and sniffs the air. It will take him some time to pick up the scent again.

 

\- - -

 

Perfectly ordinary Yuuri Katsuki is having a No-Good, Terrible Tuesday. Everything that can go wrong has gone wrong. It started in the morning with the sound of Yuuko’s retching, followed by a conversation that was probably meant to be low-key, inaudible. And perhaps it could have been, except for the way Takeshi’s voice carries. Yuuri’s been thinking about it all day: Yuuko mumbling about  _ food poisoning, probably,  _ and Takeshi, just dumb enough to believe her. Yuuri had other ideas immediately:  _ she’s pregnant, you idiot,  _ being the primary one. Only two people on all of planet earth know more than Yuuri about how much sex his roommates have been having, and those two people are Yuuko and Takeshi.  Besides, Mari’s told him horror stories that she’s picked up from the resort girls in Atlantic City. If Yuuko is pregnant, it will surprise nobody; he’s known Yuuko and Takeshi for years, ever since they all went to high school together in a hellhole on the Jersey shore which is better not spoken of. Both a class ahead of him, they graduated as high school sweethearts, and moved in together after college, setting up in a Prospect Heights flat with one and three-quarters bedrooms. After Yuuri finished his degree he took up the spare room in their flat, originally meant for Takeshi, because, like many so many artists chewed up and spit out by the big city, he was A) broke and B) desperate and therefore C) willing to subject himself to interrupting his friends’ Netflix and Chill nights whenever he arrived home from his boring, life-sucking online-marketing job. 

Yuuri knows that pregnant Yuuko probably means shotgun wedding; it’ll be the fifth one — weddings, that is, not shotgun ones — he attends this year. It probably also means his bedroom is due to be transformed into a nursery, which means he’s back on the rent market. The exorbitantly expensive rent market. Yuuri can picture the realtors now, with their knife-sharp smiles:  _ that will be a three-thousand dollar deposit, and, of course, your soul.  _ He tells himself he’ll look while he’s at work, but that doesn’t happen: there’s a campaign due with a last-minute revision for a client, and Yuuri works well into the evening to oversee the launch. Construction on the subway sends him home via an unusual route, and he winds up having to walk back from Grand Army Plaza, pondering why he ever bothered to become an artist at all. He still has another meeting to try to get to once he gets home, final approvals from Celestino Cialdini, the agency director, and he’s in the process of figuring out what exactly he’s going to say to the big man on top of the corporate food chain when someone bursts around the corner, as though they’d just sprung out of the bodega there, crashes into him, and knocks him into a puddle.

The man apologizes, swiftly, and he staggers to help Yuuri to his feet. “Sorry for getting mud and blood on your shirt,” he says, which is alarming, because the puddle was one thing, but  _ blood  _ is another, and Yuuri’s only part way through assessing these facts when the stranger piles on with a fresh insult. “That tie is absolutely hideous,” he declares suddenly. “I’m not sorry about it.” 

These are bold words from a man who’s bleeding in a tattered peacoat, face splotchy with exertion, trousers splashed with grime. Yuuri doesn’t have the chance to say as much; the other man sways on his feet and it’s left to Yuuri to catch him just before he falls into a complete drop faint. 

“Careful,” Yuuri mutters. He’s no medic. At this point he’s not surprised the universe has given him some homeless stranger to look after, too; that’s just how his day is going. “You’re pretty hurt. I can call an ambulance?”

“No hospitals,” the man in the tattered coat whispers, his eyes momentarily cloudy with pain. Yuuri has the sense that it is taking incredible willpower — or stubbornness — to stay on his feet. “They’ll come find me at a hospital. Just. Is there someplace quiet?”

Yuuri’s apartment is four blocks away, and he has no idea if it’ll be quiet. But after this morning’s retching episode, he feels absolutely no guilt whatsoever about the curious impulse to bring the stranger home and patch him up. It is something he will analyze later, trying to figure out what made him bring a bloodied lunatic into his home. For now what he knows is that the stranger has eyes as bright and blue as the summer sky, and an earnest face, and when he whispers  _ please  _ like he’s in desperate need of help, some part of Yuuri is waiting and ready to assist. 

He subsequently misses his meeting with Celestino. It’s just been one of those days. 

Yuuri fights with the ancient lock on the front door of the brownstone his flat is in, then helps the stranger up the narrow, tight spiral of three flights of stairs to his apartment. Yuuko and Takeshi aren’t home, so Yuuri leads the way to the bathroom and helps the other man out of his coat and his ruined, bloody shirt. His chest is peppered with small, healing gashes, like he’s been hit by a dozen different tiny knives, and there’s a dangerous ripple of deep, malevolent wounds across his shoulder that make Yuuri think of a giant, outstretched claw. Yuuri hesitates before starting the shower. “Are you sure? You’re really hurt.”  _ It’ll be fine,  _ he’s assured, although the stranger leaves a bloody handprint on the tile and nearly slips as he staggers underneath the spray. Yuuri pauses for just a moment, shrugging out of his own jacket, and follows him, standing there to steady his bright-eyed house guest while brackish, pink water curls around their feet. He’s already decided today’s clothes are going into the bin.  “... My name’s Yuuri,” he says, after the water circling the drain finally runs clear, and he’s fetched a pair of ratty old towels to use to clean up. “What’s yours?”

The stranger hesitates, standing in front of the mirror, where he seems to be both looking at himself, and looking past himself, unfocused in his own reflection. “I’m not sure,” he admits. “What do I look like?” The question forces Yuuri to look up from where he’s on his knees, digging through the cabinet under the sink for a first aid kit. His strange houseguest looks different now, with the sweat and grime washed away: his skin is flawless, alabaster-pale, his muscles neat and toned, hair a curious shade of platinum blonde in a ragged, ill-advised cut. He still stands in an exhausted slouch, but Yuuri finally realizes he’s taller than he first thought. 

“You don’t know?”

“I … don’t really recognize myself in the mirror.” Yuuri remembers going to see a photo exhibition once, made by an artist with no ability to remember faces, and he chalks this up as another quirk. Then he sighs to himself, starting the work of cleaning and bandaging wounds. The antiseptic barely makes the other man flinch. 

“You’ve got light, fine hair,” Yuuri explains, fighting off a blush. Now is not the time to assign words like  _ handsome  _ to someone he intends to patch up and then show the door. He unwinds a roll of bandages and twists them around the man’s injured shoulder; the muscle underneath his fingers is unmistakable.  “You’re tall. And fit. Your eyes are very blue, but...” A glance up confirms that he’s being watched as he speaks; the stranger’s gaze is curious and assessing, as though it were Yuuri whose measure were being taken. When their eyes meet, the man smiles, more gently than Yuuri would have ever expected from someone with such sharp features. “...but they’re weary. It’s hard to tell how old you are. And your mouth,” he mumbles, finally. 

“What about it?”

“It makes a heart shape when you smile.”

“ _ Heartmouth _ ,” the stranger announces suddenly. “Call me Heartmouth.” It’s an absolutely ridiculous name for a person, but Heartmouth seems to be an absolutely ridiculous person, and so perhaps it fits perfectly. Yuuri loans him a pair of sweats that are slightly too short, and a worn out shirt, and by the time he comes back to his room to make sure everything fits, Heartmouth is already asleep on Yuuri’s bed. Sleep changes his face, somehow; it’s the first time Yuuri’s thought he might look at peace. It’s the only thing that keeps Yuuri from further grumbling about his terrible Tuesday as he snatches his own pajamas and one of his pillows before heading for the couch. When Yuuko and Takeshi come home, he pretends to be asleep. Because he subsequently forgets to charge his phone, Yuuri misses his morning alarm, and wakes to find the house empty. There’s a blanket thrown over his mirror, bloody bandages in his trash-can, and Heartmouth’s shredded clothing in his laundry bin. Before he can process any of it, Yuuri’s kicked on his shoes and raced downstairs. 

The sound of Heartmouth’s voice comes from the brownstone’s tiny backyard.  _ Goddamnit, come here! I need you to send a message for me.  _ Yuuri darts down the last half-flight of stairs, discovers Heartmouth still in his sweats, making a valiant attempt to corner the siamese alley-cat that Yuuri feeds, sometimes, whenever he’s feeling nostalgic about his family dog back in Jersey. Heartmouth moves with a fluidity and grace that almost matches the cat — almost, because he’s also got a few telling marks on his face that suggest the cat’s gotten the better of him more than once. 

“Here, hang on.” There’s still a can of tuna in the cupboard, Yuuri thinks, and he goes to fetch it, wondering all the while why the cat hasn’t just done what cats do in this sort of situation: run off. When he returns with the bribe, and once the cat’s accepted it with all of the attitude of an alley king, Heartmouth does something very strange indeed, even for Heartmouth: he kneels down to the cat’s level, and begins talking to it. 

“Listen. I need you to take a message to the Marquis,” says Heartmouth, who then arches an eyebrow at the cat. “Don’t look at me like that.” The cat is fixing him with the same sassy stare Yuuri’s been pinned with countless times. “You know he’s the kind of person who knows everyone. Therefore he will hopefully know who I am. Tell him I’ll meet him at the Bridge Market at moonrise, alright?” 

Yuuri can’t help himself; he states the obvious. “You’re talking to a feral cat.”

“...Well, yes.” Heartmouth dusts his hands off as the cat finishes its meal and then leaps up the fence and off to who-knows-where. “You can always trust an alleycat to be able to get pretty much anywhere.” Then he turns, and he smiles, and for a moment Yuuri forgets that it’s Wednesday and he’s already late for work. “Would you like to go for a walk with me?” 

They go for a walk, Heartmouth in his sweats, Yuuri in a pair of jeans and an old t-shirt from his parents’ hotel. Around them, the New York morning buzzes briskly by as though neither one of them exists; workers pile into the subway station, heading towards meaningless jobs, and they miss the beauty of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch looming overhead, or the promenade of trees, or the winking gold symbols on the large doors of the Brooklyn Public Library. “I’m going to go now,” says Heartmouth, standing at the entrance of the park. “... I’m a little sorry to have brought you into all of this,” he adds, and before Yuuri can ask him what he means, Heartmouth reaches for his wrist, and presses a kiss to the back of Yuuri’s hand, which he feels for long after the bare second of contact. 

Long after Heartmouth has turned to walk down the promenade, in fact.  _ Wait,  _ thinks Yuuri, and he takes off in a run. 

It doesn’t matter, in the end: Heartmouth is gone. When Yuuri walks back to his apartment alone, the world is ordinary once more. His metrocard fails at the subway turnstile, and the machine to refill it is out of order; he winds up jumping the gate to get onto a train. In midtown, he’s jostled to and fro until he gets to work, riding up an elevator with coworkers who won’t talk to him. On his way to his desk, the receptionist stops him. “Hey man, do you have an appointment?”

“Uh, Leo?” Leo de la Iglesia is perhaps the calmest person Yuuri’s ever met, with an uncanny penchant for remembering names, and he’s looking at Yuuri with no recognition in his eyes. Yuuri rounds the corner: his desk is empty, and Celestino looks up only once, without bothering to get onto him about last night’s missed call or this morning’s late arrival. But it’s not until Kenjirou Minami, their intern, fails to recognize Yuuri that he realizes he’s been well and truly forgotten from this place. 

Stunned, he makes his way home with considerably more difficulty: it’s a six mile trek to go across the Manhattan bridge, and by the end of it he’s pretty sure his work loafers have given him blisters. At home, he walks in on Yuuko and Takeshi talking about how hard it is to make ends meet, overhears them debating whether or not they can fit a new renter in the guest bedroom.  _ Who’s going to want to live here once we have the baby, though? We’ll have to clear out all the junk in there either way.  _

“That’s my stuff,” Yuuri grumbles, but he goes utterly unnoticed as he steps inside, slams the door, and sits on his bed, trying and failing not to have a total meltdown. He yanks the blanket off of his mirror, wrapping it around his shoulders, and that’s when he sees it: a strange, ornate seal not unlike a blue rose sits on the back of his hand, exactly where Heartmouth had placed his kiss before he disappeared into the park. He does a double-take, checks his hand: it’s invisible, except in the reflection, where it is as obvious as a brand.  “Sorry to have brought you into all this,” Yuuri scoffs.  _ That bastard. He knew. _

Fury is much easier to cope with than panic. He lets it fuel him: walks back to the last place he saw Heartmouth, in the park,  just in time for one of those summer evening rains. Of course, Yuuri’s umbrella is back at the flat. That’s fine,  _ just fine; _ he’s in just the right mood for the downpour when it hits. Yuuri’s sitting ignored and forgotten on one of the benches just inside the park, willing Heartmouth to walk back down the promenade and explain himself, when he notices that the cat’s come back. It stares at him from underneath the opposite bench, perfectly dry, and then offers a pointed meow, darting up one of the dirt paths that lead away from the sidewalk and into the trees. Standing between two shadows there, it pauses to look back with narrowed, jade eyes, as though to ask  _ hey idiot, are you coming?  _

Following a cat is not the strangest part of the last twenty-four hours, so Yuuri makes his way up the muddy path, and watches as the cat steps delicately into a waiting puddle. It promptly disappears. Perhaps a different Yuuri — a Yuuri who had never met Heartmouth -- would be phased, but instead he just sighs heavily, accepting his new, strange fate. After a moment blinking at his sodden reflection in a surface that’s far smoother than it ought to be, given the plummeting rain, Yuuri steps forward, and then promptly falls head-first onto a dry, stone floor. The first thing he notices is the cat cleaning its paws by an old fireplace; the second thing he notices is that he’s not alone here: the  _ thud  _ he made as he landed has attracted the attention of a man leaning against the old brick, and a red-headed woman seated at a table with her arms crossed over a clear crystal ball. “Well, well, well,” she purrs, flashing a crooked smile. “Look what your cat dragged in, Hunter.”

The man at the fireplace does not smile. His stoic expression barely shifts as he glances down at the cat, which winds its way once around his ankles. “Yuri,” he says. “Care to explain yourself?” 

Yuuri Katsuki begins to do just that, even though the red-head snorts and laughs when he starts to speak. Meanwhile, the cat gives a long, feline stretch and then stands up, steadily growing into a blonde, teenage boy, balanced neatly on his haunches. “Shut up, Baba,” the cat-child hisses at the woman, with a roll of his eyes. “Beks. I’m  _ telling _ you I ran into some badly-glamored, half-assed copy of Nikiforov this morning, and he had me run a message off to the Marquis.”

“According to the old bear, Nikiforov’s shut himself up in his garden mazes again. We’re here to kill a rogue dragon, Yura, not to get involved in the business of princes..”

“Well, yeah, but.” The cat -- Yura or Yuri or whatever his name is -- stalks over to the table the redhead sits behind, helping himself to her bag over protest before grabbing a mirror compact. “Look at this,” he grunts, and when he reaches for Yuuri’s wrist and yanks it over to flash the mirror over his hand, he does so with surprising ferocity for someone so small. The woman, evidently used to this sort of bad behavior, whistles instead of getting offended, and Yuuri sees again in the mirror what he’s already seen: the rose-shaped seal, imprinted in blue on his hand. “I just think if you’re gonna take out a crazy dragon, or whatever, you know, it’d be easier with the prince ...”

The entire conversation sails over Yuuri’s head. What he knows is that the mark came from Heartmouth, and what he knows about Heartmouth is that he’s the reason Yuuri can’t get back to his neat, orderly little life. “Look,” he grunts, impatiently, “I don’t know who you’re talking about, but the person who did this to me is supposed to be at the Bridge Market at moonrise, whenever that is, wherever that is, and I just want to find him so he can put things back the way they were.”

“Mila,” says the hunter, tilting his head at her, and in response the red-headed woman just grins, weaving her fingers around the crystal ball in front of her.  _ On it, boss.  _ Yuuri watches, amazed, as the image transforms, and her grin brightens even further, sharp with the prospect of something dangerous. 

“It’s your lucky day, stranger. We’re all going to the same place.”

“Don’t tell him that,” says the other Yuri, the one who Yuuri is still trying to reconcile with the cat. “He’s just going to be dragon-food.”

 

\- - -

 

“Victor Nikiforov, I can’t  _ believe  _ you right now,” the Marquis curses, as they dart through the Bridge Market. Currently he and his idiot friend are being chased by the Fox and the Wolf over the various layers of the bridge, dodging spells and knives alike. The man with him is unmistakably Victor Nikiforov, except for all the ways he isn’t  _ quite _ Victor Nikiforov: his hair, which Victor’s always been tremendously vain about, is shorn short. He looks rather ordinary, all things considered, and he seems to have no ability whatsoever to acknowledge his own name. Most inconveniently, his magic is pathetically weak, which is unfortunate: Mr. Lee and Mr. Chulanont would be no trouble for a prince in his prime, and yet here he is, being chased through the market. “Any minute now,” Christophe grumbles, as he yanks his incompetent, cursed friend around a corner. “You should remember how to cast your bloody spells any minute now.” 

“Spells?” Christophe has known Victor for a long time, has seen him through any number of moods, but this reaches new heights.  _ Victor, you practically breathe ice. Every mirror on earth does your bidding. Don’t ‘spells’ me.  _ Now, evidently, is not the time for a lecture. Now is the time to feel dread creep up his spine because at the other side of the bridge — the place Christophe has been leading them — a roar sounds. It sounds suspiciously like a dragon’s roar. The Marquis Giacometti turns and looks back at his oldest friend, whose ears are rounded, and whose face shows no subtle shimmer, no hint of scales. “Mon ami, if that is what I think it is, you and I are having  _ words  _ later.”

“What?” Inquires Heartmouth, who does not know that he is also Victor Nikiforov, one of the five borough princes.

The five borough  _ dragon  _ princes.

 

\- - -

 

_ The dragon can tell this much: within the tangle of market laid out across three different layers of bridge is the man who did this to him., the mage who expunged all his worst feelings and instincts by cutting himself apart. He has left the beast with a deep and terrible sadness, ignored for far too long. The beast has no sense of crime and punishment; it knows only its sickness, its own agony, and one simple, straightforward fact:  _ **_the mage must die._ **

 

Yuuri Katsuki has never believed in dragons and he’s attempting to tell himself he’s not going to start now, although he admits it’s a lot harder to hold onto that unbelief with a dragon staring him in the face. How did that happen? Well, it started with a no-good, terrible Tuesday, which became perhaps the world’s worst Wednesday, and now here he is in the middle of absolute chaos: he’s been dragged through some sort of inverted Brooklyn to a place that somehow manages to look like all of the East River bridges at once, if they were all stacked on top of each other and then converted into some kind of weird swap-meet maze. He’s learned the cat’s name is Yuri, the hunter’s name is Otabek, and the redhead’s name is Mila; he’s learned that their abilities are unique and impressive and still somehow absolutely meaningless in the face of an ice dragon: Otabek has just been tail-whipped a solid fifteen feet back, his spear broken in half, and Mila’s sickle-shaped knives haven’t yet made a dent in its moonlight-pale scales. The dragon itself is massive, curled around the lower part of a tower Yuuri recognizes as some approximation of the Williamsburg span; its face is bigger than Yuuri’s entire body. Majestic, too, except for the way in which it just breathed a stream of ice onto four different market stalls and froze even Yuri-the-sometimes-cat’s swift feet to the ground. All Yuuri can think about is how nobody’s ever going to find his body; he’s going to go onto a missing persons list in New York City, and his parents are never going to know that he made his last stand staring down a beast of legend.

“Alright,” he mutters, because talking to the damn thing is as good a method as any when it comes to distracting himself from his imminent demise. “You’re clearly upset.” What Yuuri gets is an answering roar and another blast of ice that flies right over his shoulder, targeted at a different part of the market, where Heartmouth and a hazel-eyed blonde in a perfectly tailored, velvet suit have just sprung out onto the platform. “Heartmouth?” Behind  _ them,  _ two other figures spring out from the shadows: neat and impressive figures in black suits with sharp knives, except:  _ “Phichit?!” _

Mr. Chulanont has just bodily tackled Marquis Giacometti to the ground, with a knife pressed to his throat, and he looks up, tilts his head. “ _ Yuuri?  _ What the hell are you doing here?” When Yuuri gestures helplessly between the person Mr. Chulanont knows to be one of the five dragon princes, and what also appears to be that prince’s dragon form, incensed and cut free of its magical bounds, he curses under his breath. “Time to go home, Mr. Lee.”

“I don’t understand,” Mr. Lee, who never speaks, says. They have a contract from Leroy, one of the  _ other  _ dragon princes, and they never walk away from a contract. 

Phichit Chulanont, who was once Yuuri Katsuki’s invisible friend, rolls his eyes. “We pinky-swore,” he mutters, irritably, as he begins to get up from where he’s straddled the Marquis.  _ “Best friends forever.” _ Christophe proves incapable of keeping his mouth shut.  _ Come back any time, love,  _ quips the Marquis, with a roll of his hips that borders on rude and a suggestive wiggle of his eyebrows. Mr. Chulanont blows him a kiss, flips the knife over in his palm, and then backhands him with it. “You talk too much.” He rolls out of the way just in time to dodge another spray of ice and snow; the Marquis lays unmoving, unconscious. “Coming from me, that’s saying something, don’t you think?”

It’s an awful lot to take in.

“Yuuri,” says Heartmouth, who Yuuri can see reflected in the brilliant blue eyes of the dragon that’s so fixated on him, “you need to leave.”

_ No,  _ thinks Yuuri, who can feel Heartmouth’s kiss on his hand, as cool as winter. The dragon rears its head one more time, and Yuuri watches as Heartmouth prepares himself for the blow.  _ Not until you fix this.  _ It all happens much too quickly: the leap he makes, the burst of cold, the realization that all of it twisted around him, deflected by a sapphire-blue glow curled around his outstretched palm. In front of him, the dragon whines; behind him, Heartmouth stills. Yuuri creeps closer and closer until he can feel cold scales under his fingers, until the dragon’s massive snout is between both hands. “That’s enough now,” he says, and behind him, Heartmouth’s head tilts as though into a caress. Two different pairs of blue eyes close. Only one of them opens: standing in front of Yuuri is a long-haired man with subtle, shiny scales around his cheekbones and his eyes.

Behind them, Yuri-the-cat curses. “That was  _ you?”  _ He screeches at Heartmouth. “Victor Nikiforov, you fucking idiot—”

“Victor?” Yuuri asks. Victor Nikiforov, one of the five dragon princes, can’t remember the last time anyone’s laid a hand on him, much less like this, the way Yuuri has: attending to his wounds, and then determined to protect him, and now gently, with wonder. He is nothing worth wondering over, and  _ yet.  _

“Mr. Chulanont,” Victor murmurs, though not before leaning forward to press a soft, cool kiss to Yuuri’s forehead. It is not in his nature to let things go, not something dragons usually do. They’re hoarders, the whole rotten lot. 

Just this once, he will try to make an exception.  

“You will tell me the name of your employer, and then you will take Yuuri home.” 

 

\- - -

 

Everything goes back to normal. Yuuko and Takeshi inform Yuuri that they’re moving back to Jersey once the lease is up, and he’s back on the job by Thursday morning, with no one acting any the wiser about Tuesday’s meeting or Wednesday’s absence. The whole thing begins to feel like something from a dream, except for the way Yuuri can still see Victor’s seal on his hand, some piece of magic he’ll never understand. He tries to visit one of those psychics in the village to no avail, takes to inspecting mirrors and puddles, looks for rainstorms to walk through. 

Mostly he mopes. 

It is raining again when, under a distant gaslamp in the park which he’s never seen before, Phichit Chulanont holds a very large, very colorful umbrella. A very grouchy cat has taken shelter at his feet. Yuuri looks at them both, and then back to the entrance to the park, and when Phichit opens a door underneath a bridge that Yuuri has never seen before, Yuuri steps through. He arrives in a rose-garden, standing next to Victor, who tells him a story about a prince who once cut himself in two, and about the ruler of a rival borough, who tried to take advantage of his momentary weakness.  _ Like I’d ever let the Leroys take Brooklyn,  _ Victor scoffs. 

Yuuri has just the one question. “Is it common for people to try to kill you to take over your borough,  _ Prince  _ Victor Nikiforov?”

“Approximately every other Tuesday,” Victor laughs. He can’t remember the last time he laughed like this, but doing it makes Yuuri’s face brighten with a smile, so he’ll have to do it more often. Yuuri tells him he’s ridiculous. “Incurably so. As mad as everyone else here is, too.” Victor stops and smiles, toying with Yuuri’s wrist before lifting his hand up, and placing it inside the crook of his arm. “Places to go and people to see. I promised the Marquis we’d have tea, he wants to get to know you.” Then he leans in, as though sharing a secret. “I hope you understand I intend to hoard you. It’s what we dragons do.”

“I’m nothing special,” says Yuuri Katsuki. 

“Dear one,” says Victor, “we shall have so much time to agree to disagree.”

 


End file.
